Geothermal Just Proved It Can Compete With Solar-Plus-Storage on Price
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Geothermal has long been theclean, firm power source that was always a few breakthroughs away from being cheap enough to matter.
Numbers buried in a Nevada utility filing suggest that day may have arrived.
Joel Edwards, co-founder and CTO of geothermal developer Zanskar, put it bluntly earlier this month: "to all the geothermal believers out there, the flippening has come." In NV Energy's 2026resource plan, three geothermal offers came in at $105 to $107 per megawatt-hour.
That's below the roughly $114/MWh capacity-weighted average for the 11 solar+battery projects in the same filing.
Using the filing's corrected prices, the three geothermal deals total 180 MW at a weighted $105.56/MWh, versus 4,370 MW of solar-plus-storage at $113.89/MWh.
Geothermal just barely comes in about 7% cheaper.
Part of the story is solar getting pricier.
Edwards notes the three solar-plus-storage projects NV Energy put forward in 2024 averaged about $94/MWh.
This time, Boulder Solar III's levelized price jumped from about $85/MWh to $125/MWh after "permitting delays, land carrying costs, higher financing costs, and, of course, big, bad tariffs." The bigger point is what each megawatt-hour buys.
A geothermal plant pulls heat from underground and runs day and night, whatever the weather.
Wesaidthe same thing back in April, that it's "firm 24/7 power that intermittent renewables struggle to match." The solar average, meanwhile, "covers solar paired mostly with 4-hour batteries," Edwards wrote, "and we all know 12+ hours of storage would cost more and still wouldn't cover multi-day gaps." That's why data centers are signing up for geothermal.
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